Making sense of life as we know it, in the light of evolution.

New uses for the pubic microbiome?

A few weeks ago I posted that 80,000,000 bacteria may be transferred when you make-out with someone for greater than 10 seconds. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that a bacterial signature may also be transferred during other intimate activities.

At one point in the study, the two people who lived together suddenly had more similarity in their pubic hair bacteria than they had before. It turned out that they’d had sex 18 hours before the sample collection. Ergo, the study authors suggest, a forensic investigator could use microbial shifts to help prove that two people had had intimate contact.

Data came from a study where researchers looked at head and pubic hair samples from seven individuals, finding that pubic hair microbes are more “individualized” than head hair microbes. And while the authors acknowledge this is very, very preliminary – the (distant) applications of microbial evidence are interesting to think about:

“The implication of this present study is that the transfer of bacteria between victim and offender, in rape cases, may provide a new way of linking the offender to the victim, in instances in which no human DNA is transferred.”

The keywords of this post are ones I’m unwilling to Google Image search – so here’s an alpaca with silly hair. Relevant? No. Amusing and better than what would come up under a search for “pubic hair microbiome”? Yes.